workers is such that the surface may appear to the modern eye to have
been planed (Fig. 11).
Once reasonably true and flat surfaces have been produced, the
next step is to obtain sufficient width for the desired panel. Here we come
up against the second problem that nature presents.
More than half the total weight of a newly felled tree may be
water. As the wood dries out to the point at which it reaches stability with
the ambient humidity, it will shrink in its width and is liable to crack or
warp, depending on howit has been cut. The only boards reasonably free
from these tendencies are ones radiating directly from the tree’s heart
(Fig.12a–c). Since the heart itself is pith and must be discarded, the
widest quartered (that is, radial) board will be somewhat less than half
the diameter of the tree. Various methods have been used to get the maxi-
mum number of such quartered boards from any given log, all involving a
certain inevitable wastage. But one might imagine that through most of
history, merchants were content to take the four radial, or eight virtually
radial, boards that presented themselves when the log was first opened
into quarters, sell those at a high price, and saw up the remainder as less
valuable material.
If a panel of greater width than one quartered board is required,
and ifa heavy and willful wood such as oak is being used, it will be neces-
sary to join two or more boards edge to edge. As N. E. Muller has pointed
out, an alternative that seems to have been preferred in fourteenth-century
Italy was to use a milder, lighter wood such as poplar; take a full-width
board produced by the simple method of “plain,” or “through-and-through,”
sawing; and then restrain its tendency to distort by fixing it to a substantial
framework or battening (Muller 1993).
If boards are to be joined edge to edge, they must be made to fit
closely. This almost inevitably requires the use of a long, finely adjusted
plane, although the ancient Egyptians, who did a lot of painting on their
elaborately assembled and jointed wooden coffins and mummy cases, did
not possess planes. They probably managed by the tedious process of rub-182 Walker
Figure 10, right
A group of adzes. Used with a chopping
action toward the user and usually cutting
across the grain, adzes were the tools of pref-
erence for smoothing or hollowing wood. The
long-handled example is still fairly familiar in
wooden boatbuilding and certain other trades,
but the shorter ones, known as stirrup or slot
adzes, were likely to have been the panel
maker’s choice. Ancient Egyptian adzes have
been dated to 1450 ...
Figure 11, far right
Workman, using a stirrup adze, works across
the grain of a board that he is holding in his
hand. Detail of Lasinio’s nineteenth-century
engraving (from his Pitture a fresco del
Camposanto di Pisa[Florence, 1812, 3/1828]) of
Piero di Puccio’s 1390 fresco Noah’s Ark,in the
Camposanto, Pisa.